I'm looking forward offering the December program for the Poetry Club of the Lowcountry Senior Center. For the past year or so these monthly programs have been sponsored by The Poetry Society of South Carolina, a statewide organization that exists for poets and friends of poetry--offering readings, seminars, workshops, contests, and other special events.

Here is what I've planned for the Poetry Club on December 3:

Poems: The Path of Surprise

Writing poems should be more than telling anecdotes from a life you already know or describing something you’ve seen. It should take you down a path of surprise. “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader,” Robert Frost wisely noted. For this program we’ll use writing activities and handouts of published poems, as well as discussion, to take us farther down that serendipitous path. We’ll study poems that leap, swerve, and follow their particular logic—then we’ll write our own.

SC Academy of Authors brunch, 2013

"Every door is a lesson in leaving...."

POETRY BOOKS:
My Dear, Dear Stagger Grass (2013), winner of the Cider Press Review Editors Prize. Finalist for the National Poetry Series, the Prairie Schooner Book Prize, and the Robert Dana Anhinga Prize. Available at http://ciderpressreview.com.

Keep and Give Away (University of South Carolina Press, 2006), winner of the SC Poetry Book Prize, judged by Terrance Hayes; the SIBA Book Award for Poetry; and the Brockman-Campbell Book Award, judged by Rigoberto Gonzalez.

Lessons in Leaving, chapbook. Winner of the Persephone Press Book Award, judged by Brendan Galvin.

Other awards and prizes: the 2013 Edward Stanley Award from Prairie Schooner; the 2013 SC Academy of Authors' Carrie McCray Nickens Fellowship; and a 2011 Verna Ubben Fellowship to VCCA.